Digital Rights as a New Object of Civil Rights: Issues of Substantive and Procedural Law

The fourth industrial revolution in the world involving the transition from mechanical and analog electronic technology to digital electronics has a significant impact on the legal systems of all countries of the world, including Russia. Today, relations the subject of which is cryptoactives and relations that related with other objects of the digital world, are becoming more common. Since the legal status of digital objects is not defined in the legislation, these relations are associated with high risks. In this regard new legal acts designed to legalize and regulate new relations were drafted in Russia. Despite many disagreements one of them - «On digital rights» (hereinafter – «Digital rights law») became the law. The decisive significance of this act is seen in the fact that it expands the list of existing objects of civil rights, supplementing it with “digital rights”, which are a legal equivalent of the term “token”. The purpose of this study is to analyze the legal status of “digital rights”, the adequacy and completeness of their legal regulation in the light of the adoption of the new Law. A separate aspect of the study is the identification of procedural problems that may arise in resolving disputes related to digital rights. The key problem is that the legal status of digital rights does not have logical completeness due to the inconsistency in the concept construction of the Digital rights law. In addition, many issues related to the proof of ownership of digital assets, the imposition of a penalty on them, the implementation of liability measures provided for by the Civil Code of the Russian Federation (hereinafter – «Civil Code»), as well as consumer legislation